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[General] ZTW for Automated Backup?   [General]

By: Oliver Pretzel       
Date: Sep 10,2016 at 10:52
In Response to: [General] ZTW for Automated Backup? (Steven James)

> > > I'd like to perform fully-automated incremental backups of my
> > > primary (C:) drive (excluding C:\Windows) every night at midnight.
>
I don't think ZTree is particularly suited to performing unattended batch tasks. It is better to use a command line utility. There is a well-established small reliable free command line utility called robocopy, that has a specific command line switch for performing an incremental backup. Its syntax is a bit weird, but once you have mastered it you can easily perform very sophisticated tasks.

I have for years used it to make a weekly copy of my main data drive to an external hard drive. For additional security I use two external hard drives alternately. I start the copy manually but then leave it to do its stuff.

The command I use is

robocopy "" "" *.* /MIR /XF pagefile.sys /XD Recycler "System Volume Information"

Since robocopy interprets \" as a literal " the source and target directories should be followed by a space thus: "C:\ ". The /MIR option syncs the full source branch one way to the target (so it deletes files in the target that are no longer in the source). /XF excludes the following file names, /XD excludes the following sub-branches.

I think it would be extremely easy to schedule a version this command (after you have tested it manually to check that it works as you wish). It would probably be advisable to add an option to make robocopy write a log file if you are running at midnight. I just look at its on screen report when it has finished.

Oliver

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